The murder of a 15-year-old boy at the center of Alpha Dog is rendered all the more tragic because it is so totally, utterly senseless. While the teenagers who populate the story fancy themselves as street-smart, they appear to be engaging in make-believe until it is too late – a bunch of self-styled tough guys barreling toward a bloody climax no one is quite smart enough to foresee.

Writer/director Nick Cassavetes fiddles with some names, dates and locations, but essentially Alpha Dog follows a real-life drama that played out in L.A.’s West Hills, late in the summer of 2000. California prosecutors allege that drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood ordered the kidnapping and slaying of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz after the boy’s older brother failed to pay a $1,200 debt. Four young men were convicted in the shooting death, but Hollywood, then 20, skipped out of the country and subsequently became one of the youngest people on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list before his eventual capture.

In the tale’s jump to film, Hollywood becomes Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch); Markowitz becomes Zack Mazursky (Anton Yelchin); and Zack’s no-good older brother, the one who gets on Johnny’s bad side, is Jake (Ben Foster). We’ve seen variations of this story many times, of course; delinquent youths and senseless violence have been fueling movies since before Glenn Ford picked up a piece of chalk in The Blackboard Jungle. But Alpha Dog does a tidy job of illustrating characters who feel authentic and defy expectations.

Johnny Truelove is a prime example. Although his suburban home is decked out with high-tech gadgetry and such gangsta accoutrements as a blown-up photo of Al Pacino’s Scarface, the diminutive Johnny is a decidedly confrontation-averse kingpin. As tensions escalate, Jake breaks into Johnny’s home and leaves a turd on the living room carpet. An armed Johnny silently watches the intruder, cowering behind a door. Johnny is far more interested in acting the part of badass than actually being one.

The young cast rises to the occasion. Foster is particularly exciting to watch. With the exception of one ill-conceived fight scene in which he suddenly becomes a cut-rate Jackie Chan, Foster brilliantly evokes volatility and danger. Another notable performance comes from singer Justin Timberlake as Frankie Ballenbacher, one of Johnny’s underlings. No one will confuse Frankie for a tragic character, but he’s the closest Alpha Dog comes to having one – a somewhat dense dude given the duty of watching Zack and who subsequently becomes a substitute big brother for the hostage.

Cassavetes (John Q) enlivens proceedings with directorial flourishes. Some of it works, some not so much. He successfully underscores scenes with an air of fatalism; in one nifty gimmick, Cassavetes employs periodic freeze frames in which written text identifies a character by his or her eventual witness number.

Easily the picture’s strangest inclusion is a scenery-chewing Sharon Stone as Zack’s mother. Like the fat suit in which she’s ensconced, the performance is shameless and bloated – and particularly gross when you consider that the mother of the real-life murder victim reportedly attempted suicide after Alpha Dog’s theatrical release. —Phil Bacharach

Get it at Amazon.

Creepy old asshole Jon Voight plays creepy old asshole Ellison Betts, patriarch and Big Pharma magnate. For his 80th birthday, he invites his human possessions children and their families to his murder castle palatial estate. Jonathan Rhys Meyers (From Paris with Love) is the heir apparent, while Will Sasso (2012’s The Three Stooges) wants none of that BS. If the casting of those two as brothers seems far-fetched, just you wait.

A mysterious gift arrives for the shindig. Like all presents in screens big and small, the box is not sealed in any way, lest three seconds be wasted on watching someone rip paper. One lift o’ its lid reveals a handsomely designed game that shares the film’s title (and logo treatment): Dangerous Game: The Legacy Murders. It comes complete with a Jigsaw-esque voice barking cryptic orders over the mansion’s PA system, I guess.

What transpires is a one-by-one thinning of the Betts clan, as they’re put through a series of challenges involving secret rooms and booby traps. Sean McNamara (director of more Baby Genuises sequels than one should affix his name to) gives us a cockamamie mix of Saw filtered through the dysfunctional family dynamics of HBO’s Succession, minus the latter’s all-around brilliance. Or the former’s commitment to its formula, for that matter.

Barely mustering enough of a damn that sitting in a wheelchair requires, Voight goes whole-hog à la Anaconda, taking a tone no one else in the cast dares, because it’s not called for. Everyone else modulates to the proper level, except when asked to feign extreme pain. On that note, Legacy Murders’ standout scenes include Sasso losing a heel and a cat losing all nine lives to a whirling sink disposal.

As slick as that kitchen appliance after the fact, but lacking the kung-fu grip to squeeze any juice past the first 30 minutes, this is not a sequel to Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, the 1993 pairing of Harvey Keitel and Madonna. In case you were wondering. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

On the coast of Norway, Sofia (Kristine Kujath Thorp, Ninjababy) works as an offshore robotics researcher. She, her lab partner (Rolf Kristian Larsen, Cold Prey) and their snake-like robot camera are called into action — and accompanying NDA — to look for bodies when an oil platform topples into the water.

After the structure explodes, the Saga oil company overlords are quick to blame a gas leak from the well. Sofia, however, is not so sure. In typical disaster-movie fashion, she believes the threat comes from underneath the ocean floor. Indeed, as fractures and slides grow in number and size, hundreds and hundreds of wells are endangered — not to mention any nearby countries.

As with The Wave and The Quake, which share several producers and screenwriter Harald Rosenløw-Eeg, The Burning Sea possesses a rock-solid understanding of what makes this subgenre work best: by establishing characters — not caricatures, Mr. Emmerich — before throwing all the Bad Stuff at them. Otherwise, you’re just a CGI lightshow with no reason to care.

Fresh from helming The Quake, John Andreas Andersen already knows this. Although that 2019 film was a sequel, The Burning Sea gives us an all-new cast of realistic people, capably led by Thorp. The second half makes the event extremely personal for Sofia by trapping the man she loves (Henrik Bjelland, Now It’s Dark), so the stakes hit close to home and her literal home. But worry not, fans of global decimation: The effects are truly incredible, too. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A Sky Korea jet airliner is bound for Hawaii — and doom — in Emergency Declaration, because one of its passengers is a terrorist. Cold, calculated and no doubt crazed, Yim Si-wan’s disgraced biochemist slices open his armpit and sews a container of a deadly virus into it just prior to boarding. Once in flight, he fishes it out and lets ‘er loose, with the intent to kill everyone aboard.

On the ground, a police sergeant (Parasite papa Kang-ho Song) is alerted to a video threat the terrorist uploaded the previous day, and races against time to learn the man’s identity. It’s extra-important considering the sergeant’s wife is on that plane.

Needless to say, Jae-rim Han’s first film since 2017’s award-winning The King is not recommended for anyone with immediate travel plans consisting of a hop over an ocean. To everyone else, however, Emergency Declaration arrives as a slick, mostly satisfactory update on the 1970s airborne disaster film, swapping out the mad bomber for a more modern antisocial scientist.

I only wish it ended around the 1:40 mark, where it felt natural. Instead, the South Korean film continues for almost another hour, as Han throws more problems at the plane’s already fucked-up flight plan. Among this final (over)stretch is a scenario that practically calls for a sweaty, white-knuckled Robert Hays to take the captain’s chair. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Not knowing where a film is going isn’t the same as not knowing what a film is attempting to do. Although that may sound like semantics, the difference is immense. The former breeds suspense and surprise; the latter, frustration and resentment.

Mystery Spot brings frustration and resentment. Written, directed, edited and produced by Mel House (Psychic Experiment), the indie pic fails hard by not properly establishing its characters or feeding viewers anything beyond bread crumbs for story. At nearly two hours of wondering when things will truly “start,” the watch is wearisome. While Josh Loucka’s score hooked my ears, other creative elements come up short in a collective overreach.

Shot in Texas, the film is set at a roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. Decades ago, the place was a bona fide travelers’ attraction thanks to the Mystery Spot, an adjacent tourist-trap funhouse. Although long burnt down, its wooden remnants are whispered to be haunted. Running contrary to the title, the movie treats the spot as tangential until need be; of the 111 minutes, most tick at the motel.

In one room, a mopey, bearded slob (Graham Skipper, All the Creatures Were Stirring) auditions young women on camcorder for a supposed movie. In another is a middle-aged photographer (a fine Lisa Wilcox, Alice of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 and 5) who’s checked in to the dump for a few days. Meanwhile, a cop (Bobby Simpson II) surveils all of the above through binoculars from his completely conspicuous car in the parking lot.

The many questions raised by this slim setup remain unanswered until the conclusion. The effect is like a first date where you can’t ask the other person where they’re from, how they earn an a living or what they do for fun. Also, every now and again, a pile of sand appears. The early ambiguity of Skipper’s situation appears to be calculated misdirection, but is revealed to be either miscasting, off-key acting or poor storytelling once House’s intent — pretentious and metaphysical — finally emerges.

Psych-rock pioneer Roky Erickson once sang, “If you have ghosts, you have everything.” Mystery Spot suggests otherwise. —Rod Lott